Gartner: iPhone Sales Grow to 7.9% of all Mobile Phones Sold Worldwide

Although Apple only sells smartphones, Apple represents nearly 8% of all worldwide mobile phone sales, making it the third-largest handset maker. Gartner announced its latest mobile device data for the first quarter of calendar 2012 and it found that Apple’s 33.1 million iPhones sold accounted for 7.9% of the total mobile phone market.

It should be noted that Gartner’s data represents worldwide mobile device sales to end users, not shipments. Furthermore, the 33.1 million iPhones that Gartner says Apple sold is off by two million from the 25.1 million Apple itself reported last month. The company’s share continued to double from the first quarter of 2011 where the company sold 16.8 million iPhones and represented 3.9 percent of all mobile device sales according to Gartner’s data.

The first quarter of 2012 represented a major shift in the market as Samsung overtook Nokia, which had been the market leader since 1998 to become the number one mobile device company in the world. Samsung’s 86.8 million units sold took 20.7% of the market while Nokia was in second with 83.2 million units, or a 19.8% share. Gartner’s research also concluded that Samsung sold the most smartphones during the quarter, with its 38 million besting the 33.1 million iPhones shipped by Apple. Apple’s 7.9% share put it in third place, well behind Nokia but still comfortably ahead of ZTE, which sold 17.4 million units in the quarter and took 4.2% of the market. LG came in fifth place selling 14.7 million handset for a 3.5% share.

The biggest gainers in the first quarter were Apple, Samsung, and ZTE with RIM, Nokia, Motorola, LG, and HTC all seeing their share of the market shrink from the first quarter of 2011. Market growth, unsurprisingly, is being driven by smartphones with a total of 144.4 million smartphones sold to end users in the first quarter of 2012 and an increase of 44.7% year over year. Apple and Samsung account for 49.3% of all smartphone sales worldwide, well above the 29.3% the two collectively represented during the first quarter of 2011. Growth for iPhone sales continue to remain inevitable according to analysts.

Sales of all quarter vs current sales are different. it's like comparing if someone sold a product r one day and sold 10 items the next day they sold 5 their sales are going down total sales are still up by 15

The article that you are talking about pertains to current iPhone orders, not previous quarter sales. This article is about the previous quarter sales. They are two entirely different articles about two different subjects.